Ricoh Irish survey on safeguarding business documents released

More than a third of Irish organisations have no policy in place

Matthew McCann director Ricoh IrelandRicoh Ireland has just announced the results of a survey it commissioned of more than 200 Irish private and public sector organisations around managing business documents. The research reveals some interesting findings and was carried out with 227 IT decision makers throughout Ireland in August 2012.

More than a third (36 per cent) of those surveyed didn’t have policies in place to regulate the accessing or storage of documents for all employees in their workplace.

An additional 57 per cent of respondents admitted that their central IT departments do not have full visibility of all business documents created and held in their organisations. Ricoh says these results are particularly worrying, since many organisations could be in breach of Irish and international regulations designed to ensure that organizations take measured and proactive steps to protect all of their business data.

Another finding was that 77 per cent of those commissioned believe it's getting more difficult to effectively manage and secure all business documents. This they said was down to the growth of various document storage options which range from the company shared drive and local drives, to Google docs and mobile devices.

The results showed that the top three concerns regarding the effective management of business documents are security implications such as losing confidential company documents (79 per cent), compliance and governance issues (60 per cent), and inefficient processes (42 per cent).It’s surprising therefore that with security and compliance at the top of the agenda for Irish businesses, almost half (48 per cent) were honest enough to admit that they are not aware of all the personal devices being used by employees to create documents for work-related activities

Another revealing finding from the survey is that while almost all respondents feel that it's important to have an efficient and secure document management system for their organisations, only just over half (56%) actually have a working system in place which has the capability to manage and retrieve all business documents, including print and electronic.

The survey also showed that a significant amount of Irish organisations (62 per cent) now primarily use electronic invoices, rather than paper-based versions.

Since the European Commission is aiming for e-invoicing to be the predo

f staff turned to the IT department to help them find a business document that they could not access, the average time to retrieve it was 25 minutes, which is highly unproductive for both parties. Surprisingly only 3 per cent admitted that the document was never found.

Matthew McCann, director, Ricoh Ireland, commented on the results:

"With the on-going explosion in data, documents and devices, Irish organisations are finding it increasingly complex to manage and safeguard all of their information capital,” he said. “The results of the survey highlight the huge disparity which exists between the desire for better control and visibility of business documents and the actual lack of systems and policies that are currently in place.

"Irish businesses need to act now or they will suffer increased loss of productivity, poor customer service and are at increased risk of losing critical business information. On top of this, they are open to fines or worse from local and international authorities if they are found to be non-compliant with legislation in this area.

"To improve business document processes, there needs to be joined-up thinking across organisations from now on. An integrated system with clearly defined policies should ensure that every single person in the organisation understands how to quickly and safely store and access business documents.

"Despite some of the worrying stats in this research, there is still room for optimism. With most of the world's leading multinationals having major operations in Ireland, they have very thorough processes in place to manage their business documents. This technology and know-how is now also being rolled-out by forward-thinking indigenous companies, giving them a real competitive advantage as they have instant access to information whenever and wherever they need it."